Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery loves local comix! This Saturday features the festive opening of "Lovesick," an exhibition of emerging and established artists from the Bureau of Drawers cartoonist collective. The show includes original art, handmade books and prints by over 16 Seattle comix artists and illustrators who will be present on February 12 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM — just in time for Valentine's. Acoustical serenades by Bureau of Drawers members Dennis Driscoll and Sean Robinson, DJ Russ Fallout spinning lovely platters, and complimentary beverages promise to make this a memorable evening. Bring your sweetie — or find one in the romantic Georgetown arts district.

This event coincides with the 3rd anniversary edition of the colorful Georgetown Second Saturday Art Attack featuring adventurous - and amorous - visual and performing arts events throughout the historic neighborhood. For more information and a participant map visit: www.georgetownartattack.com. Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is located at 1201 S. Vale St. (at Airport Way S.) just minutes south of downtown Seattle. Open daily 11:30 to 8:00 PM, Sundays until 5:00 PM. Phone 206.658.0110.

Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles is showcasing original art from Tim Lane's Fantagraphic book ABANDONED CARS. SHQ customers will know Tim's work from the awesome bags he designed for them. From SHQ's press release, here's Tim's statement:

This collection of original comic pages depict my first experience freight train hopping, and are from the story SPIRIT in ABANDONED CARS. They are my favorite pages in the book, mainly because they represent a past experience that changed my life. Since I drew them a decade after the initial experience, they required a great deal of research to depict accurately, since the details of the locations were no longer fresh in my mind. To make sure that those details were accurate, I traveled back to all the relevant locations in an attempt to insure the authenticity of the story. To my great relief, things hadn't changed much since 1995, and it turned out that geography and architecture proved that my memory was in pretty good working order - my recollections hadn't become embellished too much over time.

This is the only story in ABANDONED CARS that is completely autobiographical, a form with which I don't feel very comfortable, and for that reason SPIRIT is atypical. But I think it serves an important purpose in the greater context of ABANDONED CARS because it places me among the cast of characters portrayed in the other short story selections. I hope you enjoy the original drawings from that story.

This picture (above) was taken in 1995, around the same time SPIRIT took place. Here I was in the Mission in San Francisc on Florida Street. At the time, I had been casing the West Oakland Yards (jumped only once but the train aborted to a sidetrack, where I spent a very cold night sleeping on the floor of a metal boxcar). Around this time I gave up freight hopping after reading and article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Robert Silveria, Jr, the hobo serial killer, who had recently been caught in the Bay area. He'd killed something like fourteen people along the rails, and murdered their dogs, if they had them, as well. One bad dude, no question.

• Review: "I’ll admit that Blecky Yuckerella isn’t a comic for everyone, and that Johnny Ryan’s sense of humour is definitely an acquired taste. However, if you’ve got a sick sense of humour, like I have, you will laugh your ass off non-stop, as you read this hilarious collection from cover to cover. I loved it so much that I actually contacted Johnny Ryan by email and purchased the original artwork for the very last Blecky strip from him. If that’s not a seal of approval, I don’t know what is!" – Edward Kaye, Hypergeek

• Scene/Profile: At Comic Book Resources, Josie Campbell reports from Joyce Farmer's recent appearance at Skylight Books: "Farmer spoke frankly about the detrimental treatment her stepmother received while in a nursing home, culminating in her falling out of bed due to the orderlies' negligence. 'They killed her,' said Farmer. 'You drop an eighty-six year old person three feet to a concrete floor, it's going to end their life.' Despite its dark tones and serious subject matter, Farmer emphasized the important role humor played in the novel and in her parent's lives. 'I wanted to keep humor in the book,' said Farmer. 'I had a lot of fun in there, a lot of funny stories. I tried to make it an honest book, and show the universal in the daily minutia.'" [Edited to reflect a corrected byline.]

We've made a perhaps-overdue update to our online shop, creating a new category called "Vintage Comics" for our collections of early comic book stories. This should make them easier to find all together than in the overarching "Classic" category, which includes newspaper strips, illustration books and other stuff.

What it is:

"Fantagraphics is pleased to present collections of the finest comic book art and artists from the pioneering days of comic books in the middle decades of the 20th Century (and scholarly writing thereon). These lovingly-restored, beautifully-designed tomes present the best and most noteworthy work from the era, in genres ranging from superheroes to horror to crime to romance to humor. These books will hone your appreciation of the exciting and groundbreaking stories and artwork from the early days of comic books — not to mention providing a lot of fun reading!"

The link to the section has a permanent home in our "Browse Shop" menu tab, under the "Interests & Topics" heading (formerly "Interests"). You may notice we made a few other tweaks to that menu as well, mainly shuffling some items around into a (hopefully) more logical configuration. Hope you like it!

The Jim Woodring documentary, THE LOBSTER AND THE LIVER, is screening at Seattle's Grand Illusion Cinema this Friday, February 11th, 2011 at 7pm and 9pm (part of a week-long run for the documentary at the Grand Illusion ). Jim Woodring will be giving a Q&A after the 7pm screening, and Fantagraphics has provided some Woodring books to give away to a few lucky attendees. Don't miss it!

• List:PLAYBACK:stl's Steve Higgins puts What I Did by Jason on his Top Graphic Novels of 2010: "In my recent review of What I Did, I stated, 'Each story on its own is unquestionably superb, and readers will delight in the moods Jason evokes and the artistic techniques he employs. Together the stories in What I Did are sterling examples of Jason’s fantastic skill as both an illustrator and a storyteller that are well worth the purchase in spite of their vast differences in tone, style, and content.' And it’s still true."

"The second hardcover volume in Linda Medley's Castle Waiting series is a fantasyish, girl power fairy tale — and so much more." – Rebecca Buchanan

• Review: "Each change, each mutation is the beginning of a thought without a defined path that will take the reader into the recesses of his mind. It can be simple aesthetic sensory enjoyment, perhaps of ravishing beauty, perhaps creepy horror; it can be a profound reflection on the significance of humanity or a simple gag in the purest tradition of slapstick. Either option is good: the silent Frank stories are surely a shock that spins the reader's neurons at high speed, a total reset of the system of established reality that leaves the mind in a renewed state of equilibrium. A masterpiece..." – Álvaro Pons, El País (translated from Spanish)

• Review: "[King of the] Flies is essentially about moments, one strange moment after the other. It brings to mind David Lynch but it should also bring to mind Alfred Hitchcock. Rigorously planned out ahead of time, his best work retains the freshness and kinetic energy of so many strange moments perfectly timed. Undoubtedly, Flies will be more than a string of moments and will have an ending as poetic as its best scenes." – Henry Chamberlain, Geekweek

• Review: "Prince Valiant comics are constantly being reissued around the world, but this collection began in 2009, published by Fantagraphics, is special for its concern with restoring Foster's work with the utmost fidelity. The original art was respected and carefully reconstructed from the original proofs and other sources of high quality. The publication in color, in hardcover and on luxurious opaque paper is just right. It is a definitive edition and a fitting tribute to the art of Hal Foster." – Gustavo Guimaraes, Ambrosia (translated from Portuguese)

• Review: "Jason’s tales of the distracted and listless existences of dog-faced Europeans are so consistently excellent that it’s almost predictable, but while [Werewolves of Montpellier] has his usual skilled construction and subdued colour palette, there’s also some rather good characterisation." – Grant Buist, The Name of This Cartoon Is Brunswick

• Review: "These strips can be a comfort, an amusement, can provide a moment to stop and think. Here [in The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952] you see Charlie Brown before his shirt gets the zig-zaggy stripe; how Linus was introduced as a baby as was Schroeder. You see the small common things that set the groundwork for what would become a life’s work." – Jenny Spadafora, 12frogs

• Profile: Sean O'Toole of Johannesburg's The Times tracks down Joe Daly: "I'm partly curious to see if he looks like his character Steve, described by Millennium Boy as an 'old orangutan mama.' The thin, bearded, slightly awkward man I meet in Observatory isn't apish, nor does he wear a bathrobe à la Jeff Lebowski. He also doesn't have lactating boobs, which Steve briefly grew in a strip appearing in Scrublands, Daly's first US book from 2006." (The Comics Reporter has additional commentary on the article.)

• Profile:Mania's Niko Silvester puts Moto Hagio in the "Creator Spotlight" with a brief overview of her career

• Plug: "If you’ve not been checking out Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts series, I would highly recommend that you start doing so! They are archiving Peanuts every story that Shulz ever wrote, in gorgeous hardcover collections, that contain one to two years of the strip, starting from 1950. It’s one of the best archive projects out there, and I can’t recommend collecting them highly enough!" – Edward Kaye, Hypergeek

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